Worker sues D.A.’s office alleging retaliation for reporting slur

Updated 5:31 pm, Monday, January 4, 2016

An African American investigative assistant with the San Francisco district attorney’s office says a co-worker called her a racial slur and that human resources representatives with both the city and the office failed to take action or properly look into the matter.

Twanda Bailey sued the agency and the city in San Francisco Superior Court, alleging she was retaliated against professionally for complaining about the slur.

“To be called the n-word is offensive enough,” Daniel Bacon, Bailey’s attorney, said Monday after filing the lawsuit last week.

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He said the human resources director for the district attorney’s office considered the alleged conduct “not hostile enough to create an environment that is hostile to a person because of their race. The city refused to investigate it, saying it was not something that would alter the terms and conditions of employment.”

Bailey said the dispute began Jan. 22, 2015, when a mouse ran through the office she shared with her co-worker, who was identified in the suit as being Southeast Asian. Bailey said that when she jumped and screamed, the co-worker quietly told her, “You n— are so scary.”

Though upset, Bailey said she did not initially report the slur to human resources because she knew the co-worker was friends with the office’s human resources director, Evette Taylor-Monachino.

She reported it a few days later, she said, after other co-workers and her supervisor encouraged her to do so. But according to her lawsuit, when she met with Taylor-Monachino to get a copy of the complaint in March, Taylor-Monachino told her there was no paper record of the complaint.

Bailey said she was then forced to take over duties for the co-worker as well as other menial tasks that were not part of her job description. She said Taylor-Monachino went on to jeer and make snide comments at Bailey whenever they interacted.

Bacon said that treatment, coupled with the first and only poor job evaluation Bailey had received in her more than 14 years at the office, pointed to a pattern of retaliation. Bailey filed an equal employment opportunity complaint with the city, but the city declined to investigate it.

“While we acknowledge the extreme offensiveness of the ‘N’ word and understand how upsetting it was to you to hear such a highly offensive term, one comment is not sufficiently severe or pervasive as to alter the condition of your employment and create an abusive working environment,” Micki Callahan, the city’s human resources director, wrote in a July letter.

Callahan went on to say that “an offensive utterance or even a pattern of social slights by either the employer or co-employees cannot properly be viewed as materially affecting the terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.”

The city attorney’s office declined to comment on Bailey’s lawsuit.

Alex Bastian, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said, “The matter was referred to the city Department of Human Resources. They looked into it and took the action they deemed appropriate. Given that it is a personnel matter, we are unable to comment in more detail at this time.”

Both the co-worker who allegedly used the slur and Taylor-Monachino remain with the office, though Taylor-Monachino was placed on leave in August for allegedly misusing a family member’s disability parking placard.

Bailey is still employed by the office as well, but has been out on disability from stress and depression she says stemmed from the slur and its aftermath. She said two black female co-workers had endured similar harassment from the woman who used the slur.

“Hopefully, they won’t be able to do this to anyone else,” she said. “Hopefully, it stops here.”